Super Unsexy By Design: Ben Green on Algorithmic Realism

Ben Green (0:00)

Hello.

Andrew Keen (0:01)

My name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. One of my favorite all-time books is one by a Czech writer, Joseph Skvoretsky. It's called The Engineer of Human Souls. It's a wonderful parody of the promise of communism. Of course, it's borrowed from Stalin's definition of the engineers of human souls being writers. But I wonder whether the idea of engineering and engineers of this human soul has come back into fashion. There was a recent piece by Stephen Witt, who's appeared on the show. He's the biographer of Jensen Huang, the CEO, the chief engineer of NVIDIA. A piece in the New York Times entitled, He's the Most Powerful Engineer on Earth. Here's why he thinks AI is going great. What it occurred to me having read the piece, it's a good piece, is that engineers now, for better or worse, are running the world and it's their way of thinking about reforming the world that seems to be becoming conventional.

This all comes to mind because my guest today on the show is a professor of data science, Ben Green. He has a new book out. It's called Algorithmic Realism, Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice. I'm not accusing Ben, of course, of being a Stalinist. But Ben, would it be fair to say that we live in an age of the engineer, for better or worse, and that's where you're coming at us from in terms of your book and your work. You're a professor of information and public policy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Ben Green (2:20)

Absolutely. We are in an age where the most powerful companies in the world are tech companies and particularly AI companies, and the imperatives of technology development and in particular, AI development are really at the heart of how society is being reordered and how the economy is functioning. If you look broadly at the economy, most of economic growth these days is really just capital investment tied to data centers and all of the companies at the top of the stock market are big tech companies at a level of concentration that we've never seen before.

I'm deeply concerned about the direction that AI development is pushing us in as a society. My book, Algorithmic Realism, is trying to chart out a different direction for technology development and in particular, a different way of thinking about engineering and how to actually develop algorithmic systems and AI systems that work for the betterment of humanity rather than just accruing power and profits.

Andrew Keen (3:31)

Although I'm not necessarily a defender of big tech, but they would at least argue that whether or not they have a bad reputation, they're doing their best. Recently, we had Matthew Botvinick on the show. He's a senior guy at Anthropic. He has a new book, Our AI and Political Freedom, The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond. It's an engineering attitude to how to fix democracy.

You're coming at us, Ben, it's no surprise given your subtitle about the promotion of social justice. You're coming at it from the left. But from the left as a progressive, are you suspicious of big tech or the idea of engineers and engineering being the thing in itself? Are they good and bad engineers in your mind?

Ben Green (4:26)

Yeah, I am definitely not rejecting the idea of engineering writ large. In fact, this book is in many ways trying to provide a new model of what engineering can look like that is working toward social justice. Because right now, AI development is sort of weighed down or brought in a dark direction by both the methods of the field, which is sort of the core critique of my book, but also the political economy of tech. I think it's very hard to say that these tech companies are doing their best when there are so many examples of them clearly having evidence that their systems are harmful and not taking action.

And we've seen this for years, right? Even Facebook, many years ago, having knowledge about how harmful social media platforms were for the mental health of teens and continuing to do things anyway. And now more recently, we look at OpenAI's agents hacking, hugging face and hacking other websites and platforms. A lot of that can just be tied down to negligence, rather than them doing their best and making innocent mistakes. And then, of course, they were really quite slow in actually revealing this information. So I think there is a... I'm deeply suspicious of Big Tech, and I think we need to create directions for engineering that are divorced from Big Tech and have a methodology and a culture that is much more grounded in social impact and societally important questions.